My uncle in London convinced me to stop renewing my US passport

He said "you're paying $130 every 10 years to a country you haven't lived in since 2015" and honestly he was right. I just let mine expire last month and I'm not even sad about it. Has anyone else dropped one citizenship just to simplify taxes?

4 comments

4 Comments

jadej501mo ago

Letting a passport expire is one thing but actually renouncing sounds like a nightmare. Gray's right, that exit tax thing is brutal from what I've read. I can barely handle filing my regular taxes without wanting to set my laptop on fire, so dealing with IRS agents for a year sounds like my own personal version of hell.

gray_morgan1mo ago

Yeah but are you sure about this? I get the tax thing but renouncing US citizenship is a whole different level than just letting a passport expire, they make you go through this whole process and pay a fee if you actually want to give it up. My cousin did it after moving to Germany and he said it took over a year and he still has to file taxes for a few more years as a "covered expatriate" or whatever that means. Did your uncle mention any of that or is he just talking about not renewing the passport?

logan5251mo ago

Honest to god the exit tax was worse than I expected.

carter.joseph27d ago

I guess I don't see why the exit tax is such a HUGE deal unless you're sitting on like millions of dollars or something. @jadej50 mentioned struggling with normal taxes but like, doesn't the threshold for getting hit with that thing start pretty high income wise? Unless your uncle is legit rich it might not even apply to him the way people are making it sound.